RICHMOND, Va. -- Through each of their separate hazes of smoke that occurred while they wrecked during Saturday night's Crown Royal 400 at Richmond International Raceway, Jeff Burton, Mark Martin, Jamie McMurray and Marcos Ambrose would've never thought a top-10 finish was possible.

“

I still say it's not necessarily the guy in Victory Lane every week who did the best job; it's the guy that found a way to make something out of something that didn't look good.

”

JEFF BURTON

New tires brought Burton to third and Martin to fifth, while McMurray, who didn't pit, held on for seventh. Ambrose only missed his third top-10 in the last six races by one spot, when he finished 11th. And even Sam Hornish Jr., who won two IndyCar Series races here, stormed into a career-best sixth place, the second time he's done that in the last three races.

None of comeback drivers was involved in anything significant for the race's first 168 laps, when five of the event's 15 cautions occurred. From then on one metal-grinding mishap after another hit many contenders, but these guys emerged from the 400-lap melee smiling.

"Oh, no -- I have to be honest, when I was sliding through the infield and into Carl, I never thought we could finish like this," McMurray said, referring to his crash with teammate Carl Edwards. "We got a lap down because we waited a little too long to pit that first run, and our car was a little bit too tight, but once we got our lap back I thought we were in good shape because the car drove really well."

Then McMurray got the smoky party started when David Stremme and Edwards got together coming off Turn 4 on Lap 168, with Edwards' No. 99 Ford spinning into the infield grass. McMurray spun behind him and ended up hitting Edwards' car.

"We got caught up in that wreck and it's amazing sometimes how you can hit the wall with these cars and it knocks the steering out, the toe out and everything," McMurray said. "And then there's other times like, when I hit Carl I thought, 'That's it, we're done, this is probably destroyed.' And it wasn't even tore up. We came back and the car drove really, really good."

As the race's end game played out, McMurray opted to stay on track rather than taking tires. With a raft of lapped cars interspersed with the leaders, he only fell from third on Lap 359 to seventh at the finish.

"We saw in practice that guys with four- or five-lap fresher tires could run a tenth [of a second] quicker," McMurray said of caution flags winning out over new tires late in the race. "I was just yelling that I wanted tires at the end but we just had a good enough car to kind of hang on and the guys that put tires on caught us with just a few laps to go, so we were able to hold them off.

"When you're on the pit box and you're watching lap times, you see more than what just the drivers do, so Donnie [Wingo, crew chief] did a good job making us stay out and we had a good enough car to hang on. At the end our car was just the best it was, but [Saturday] we got to have some great luck with the way the cautions fell. It couldn't have went much better for us."

Burton had only a little less time than McMurray to recover, but received considerably more damage when at Lap 213 Dale Earnhardt Jr. raced into Turn 3 inside Burton only to have his No. 88 Chevy wobble and spear Burton's No. 31 Impala, causing it to spin and hit the Turn 4 wall.

"Junior and I don't have any problems -- just a racing incident," Burton said. "We were both kind of struggling. He just got loose and came up the track. I've spun people out like that before."

“

We hit the wall more times than I want to remember.

”

MARCOS AMBROSE

Burton fell back to 24th position but crew chief Scott Miller and his team worked to repair the car and put Burton in position to rebound. The critical move was pitting for tires with just more than 50 laps to go. It enabled Burton to score his best finish of the season and move up two spots in the standings, to seventh.

"You know, we're pretty resilient and we just go fight," Burton said of the comeback. "I take a lot of pride in trying to make something happen. I still say it's not necessarily the guy in Victory Lane every week who did the best job; it's the guy that found a way to make something out of something that didn't look good. Again, I'm not the fastest guy, but we just work real hard to try to chisel finishes out."

Hornish himself said he was surprised to score his career-best finish on Phoenix's 1-mile short track two races ago, then do it three spots better at Richmond in his No. 77 Dodge. He had a role in the wreck that eliminated Kevin Harvick's top-10 contending Chevrolet, when he hooked Harvick on the backstretch and cut his car's right-rear tire. Later, he was involved in the accident that tore up Ambrose's car, but without prompting he mentioned neither, preferring to focus on a definite positive.

"We waited maybe one stop too long to come in and get tires or we might have had something for them there at the end [but] I'm real proud of these guys and how hard they worked," Hornish said. "I told a lot of people [Friday] we had a better car than a 28th-place qualifying car. We tried to stay out of trouble the best we could, got into the normal short-track stuff [Saturday]. I'm just glad we persevered -- didn't tear the car up too bad.

"I like the short tracks more all the time. I wouldn't have thought my first two top-10s would come on short tracks. We've had some real good runs and been real strong this year. I feel like I'm learning all the time. The team is growing and getting stronger. Hopefully we'll get ourselves a couple more spots closer to being in the top 20."

While Hornish moved up a spot to 30th in the standings, fellow rookie candidate Ambrose remained in 19th. The two got together in Turn 2 to bring out a caution on Lap 308 and it deranged the back of Ambrose's No. 47 Toyota. While the field circled under caution, he pitted and then caught up to the pack at full speed, bobbing and weaving to test his car's handling. New tires also helped him come forward in the end.

"We hit the wall more times than I want to remember," Ambrose said. "I'm just really proud of my guys, we never give up. It was another strong night and I'm just excited that we're moving forward in the points, moving forward with our team and we got another finish, even with some damage.

"The car wasn't good [at the end]. I bent the right side up pretty good early on and the handling went away, then we did the rear-end and that made it even worse, and it was just fighting and gouging and never giving up. Our team just doesn't give up.

"We were on the edge at the end, thinking do we stop or not stop. I think tires helped us, for sure, at the end. I wanted tires because it was safer -- I thought I was going to get run over again if we didn't have tires."

Maybe the hugest comeback belonged to Martin, who'd been in the top 10 the entire race until the field bunched up in Turn 2 after a restart. When Burton, race winner Kyle Busch and Tony Stewart slowed, Martin hit Stewart, then was run over by Stewart's teammate, Ryan Newman. Martin spun his No. 5 Chevrolet out and was then T-boned by Martin Truex Jr.

He fell back to 19th, but came forward at the end. Martin just laughed when asked if he had to drive harder for this fifth-place finish than for some of the 36 victories he has in his career.

"I had to drive harder to pass some of the lapped cars than I have to win a lot of races," Martin said. "Man, those lapped cars were just hard to pass. It was just a free-for-all."

When the top-finishing cars pulled onto pit road after the race, fourth-place finisher Newman was parked near Martin, and Newman immediately got out, went to Martin's car and had a conversation with Martin that left the Hendrick Motorsports driver smiling.

"I hit the guy in front of me and [Newman] hit me twice," Martin said. "The first time he hit me we were OK, but then he got hit and knocked sideways and that time when he hit me it turned me around. It was just, I don't know -- it was pretty wild out there.

"This race team fought hard -- a pretty spectacular race car I had all night. I had some bad luck but we came back. This was one that we could rebound from and some of the others we haven't been able to. This team just dug in and got it done. I'm proud of them and I'm glad that one is over with. We'll straighten this thing back out and bring it back out."